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Friday, May 20, 2016

Good for Pfizer!

After pharmaceutical company Pfizerannouncedon
May 13 that it will clamp down on the distribution of its drugs so that they
can no longer be used in executions, any state that wants to use lethal
injection will now have to resort to getting them on underground markets.

Pfizer announced that it will restrict seven products —
pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, propofol, midazolam, hydromorphone,
rocuronium bromide, and vecuronium bromide — that are used in executions.

Those products will now only be available to a select group of
wholesalers, distributors, and direct purchasers who verify that they won’t
resell them to correctional institutions for executions, and any government
entity that wants to buy them has to certify that they will only be used for
patient care and will not be resold.

Pfizer says it will “consistently monitor” the seven drugs to root
out any noncompliance and modify its policies if need be to make sure that they
aren’t used in lethal injections.

“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the
patients we serve,” the company said inits statementannouncing
the new policies. “Consistent with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the
use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”

Without supply from Pfizer, states that use lethal injection now
have no open-market source of getting drugs. “With Pfizer’s announcement, all
F.D.A.-approved manufacturers of any potential execution drug have now blocked
their sale for this purpose,” Maya Foa, director of human rights group
Reprieve’s death penalty team,told the New York Times. “Executing states must now go
underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection.”

The announcement comes after more than 20 drug companies in the
United States and Europe had similarly restricted products that are used in
lethal injection. It also comes after Pfizer acquired Hospira, which makes
drugs used in executions and had tried but failed to prevent their use in state
prisons.

Thirty-one statesstill
authorize the death penalty, and lethal injection is the primary method.

But these states have faced increasing road blocks in their attempts
to access the drugs since 2009, when technical production problems shut down
the only federally approved factory making sodium thiopental, a barbiturate
given to render inmates unconscious before the lethal drugs are administered.

Since then, manufacturers have increasingly sought to avoid being
associated with executions and barred corrections facilities from buying their
drugs.

In response, states have experimented with new combinations of
drugs and tried to import them from other countries or use straw buyers to
access them.

Some have bought drugs from compounding pharmacies that aren’t
regulated by the FDA. Others have even considered turning to the use of theelectric chair,firing squads, and gas chambers.

Others, including Arizona, Oklahoma, and Ohio, have had to delay
executions for months at a time because of drug shortages or injunctions over
their methods.

Amid these challenges, capital punishment hasbeen on the decline. Last year just six states
performed executions — the bulk of them in one state, Texas — and killed 28
people in total, a 70 percent decrease from a peak of 98 people in 1999.

Thought for the day

“Charlottesville is a great place that’s been very badly hurt over the last couple of days. I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It is in Charlottesville.”

Donald Trump, responding to a question whether he would go to Charlottesville to offer support and comfort as so many Presidents have done in the past.

Quick fact check: Donald Trump does not own the winery; his idiot son Eric does under the name Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC. And at 36,000 cases annual production, the winery is not even the largest winery in Virginia, never mind the United States.

Information and Feedback

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